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12 NOTES ABOUT Jori GRAHAM

MICHAEL SZYMAŃSKI

The syntax of how badly broken arm fused. The words in verses poupychane tightly run off at the end of the next line like rejects them remains . Some are arbitrarily cut, the other pushes from inside the bridge en dash

1

One of the most awarded American poets existed for more than thirty years in the Polish consciousness of the reader. Translations of individual poems scattered in the annals of specialized magazines are almost impossible to track down - you have to dig a heap. Who went for the most obvious clue "World Literature", is a sorely disappointed ę as thick magazine with the mission of acquiring foreign literatures reprinted not been any rows Jorie Graham. Reading "clearances" to some extent explains the absence. After thirty pages sincerely admired the acrobatic work of translators: Ewa Chrusciel and Milosz Biedrzycki, after seventy admiration mixed with equally sincere sympathy.

I have a theory about books and literary catching up. They should be fine. Top - thin. When absent in the Polish language author appears on the shelves of bookstores in the form of books housed bloated hundreds of rows, you can go crazy with excess impressions. Chrusciel and Biedrzycki chose a middle path: put on the cross and constructed panorama. "Clearances" is a walk through the most interesting lines of Jorie Graham removed in homeopathic doses of all volumes - from his debut "Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts" (1980) after last year's "Place". Watch poet in flares hits, economical and tense as intellectually (first volume), calmed and prone to linear stories (some Italian poems from the volume "Erosion", 1983) and threw in an ecstasy of words on paper (all others). It is difficult to say with a clear evolution, because style and sensitivity adjustment does not affect the coherent vision of poetic words that Graham from the beginning wanted to turn into the fabric of life on the Rights tool to know your body and stimulates the imagination. Also, from the beginning, since the late 70s, used the poetry its particular perspective.

2

Jorie Graham, "Clearances. Selected Poems

1980-2012 ". Switch. Ewa Chrusciel, Milosz Biedrzycki,

Literary Bureau, Pretoria , 172 pages ,

in bookstores since January 2013

Jorie Graham was born in 1950 in New York City. Her mother was a sculptor and painter, his father a well-known journalist and war correspondent. Dziecińs two sp ędziła in Rome and Paris. The walls of European capitals overlap the vast American spaces. It was a happy childhood, ominous shadow of the past is put on the lines. Apparently she liked having fun outdoors (sidewalk, the sun, lunch eaten in a hurry, call outside the window). If you believe the poetry, which is not always a good ending, two events had a major impact on their children's inner life: benign disease, for which there she went to school and the head lying on the pillow spun the word "absent", and the film screening "Lolita" Kubrick interrupted by the news of killing the president. Got to know the world in three languages, experiencing a sense of artificiality ("taught me three / Name the tree outside my window"). Soon, language becomes a kind of curtain Mai to be rip at the weakest point. So far, studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, the Film Department at New York University, where he walked down the long corridor hear a strong voice reciting "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by TS Eliot and cogs unexpected surprise in her heart. The first songs announced in literary magazines in 1977 years .

According to the American critics, artists Pulitzer Prize winner in 1996 years stems from the tradition of Keats, Rilke, Stevens, Eliot, Ashbery. In addition, Graham is considered postmodernistkę, feminist and ekopoetkę, but her poetry does not fit in any of these trends.

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"It may seem exaggerated, but I think the lines are acting out in - playing the ritual as a fractal - the movements of history. In this process, experienced his own responsibility. You feel in yourself, the most important movements caused by culture, because they are doing the same, are making them - helpless - in a row. "

(Jorie Graham in conversation with Thomas Gardner)

"- All this is storming the wall. Is hell or heaven - is another matter. "

(Jorie Graham, "Some Notes on Silence")

"I use poetry - but not just poetry - to maintain presence. I am also a teacher, academic, and what you usually learn, is to be present in the body experiences. To actually feel that our senses work. "

(Jorie Graham in an interview with Sharon Blackie)

"The meaning of the lines Jorie Graham is temporary and delayed".

(Ewa Chrusciel, "On the frontier of knowledge, always between")

"Writes" a European of American origin ", and read her poems like" listening to Shostakovich after Tchaikovsky. '"

(Helen Vendler of Jorie Graham)

4

The syntax of how badly broken arm fused. The words in verses poupychane tightly run off at the end of the next line, like water droplets or rejects them remains . Some are arbitrarily cut, the other pushes from inside the bridge en dashes. Long sentences shredded dozens of dashes, colons, parentheses, commas. Neighbourhood two are used does not prejudge anything. Thoughts go out and revived in a new context. Clear passage is immediately tear. Repetition. Ajar threads. Withdrawal description digressions that blur, the gaps that seem to suck the words gathered around and empty boxes to encourage complete with a pencil. What to do? How to find that? Head breaks. Kłębienia Impression: greasy pile of wriggling worms in the container angler. Strategies paradox, the "yes" seamlessly switches to "no". Places a rhetorical language that relates its course and asks the reader making him the hero of the line: just think, but look, look, do you understand? Do you remember? The changes in personal pronouns make it not quite know who just says, who hears.

5

It's not fun to tear and roll out linguistic structures. The rate of these lines seems to be much greater. Reading forces parting with a range of reading habits. For example, the belief that the line is moving in a certain direction that the eye movements of followers from left to right and down the forward motion, or the habit of searching the text strong point, which Ła two rewind AC holding a pile of interpretation. Everyday assumptions poet brain at work - ready for painting waiting for the right word - also can not be defended. Imagination Jorie Graham reminds empty stage, you just act of writing and reading fill temporary objects forming constellations of meaning. Line is trying to be an event, "playing the experience" in front of and with the participation still hooked the reader, not the container to experience previously understood ("Some Notes on Silence"). Which of course goes differently verses printed on paper not so Ła two jump C.

Program antymimetyzm does not mean self-contained text-closing event in a vacuum. Long rows of tentacles wrap around the real world. Slide on the wall ready to courts and comfortable illusions. As promised storm mystery.

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The mystery that unknowingly we know, non-

visible thing

is it ironic? or something mean? - Clean

dizziness,

in which we try to stick the suction opening

our lives -

in gold, devoid of the origin point,

so neat,

fading, while also becoming more rojny,

rozświergotany multiplicity, if she later

clot

the strumming singularity - the mystery - where the words

twist -

looking for it everywhere -

on my chest, check the nipple,

we are looking for in the joy of thy fingers, the course

caresses,

twisting and disheveled of my architecture

neck, my

open mouth - looking in your mouth -

we look quickly at the day before - we turn

sight -

Again we look at your violent lips

to building your whisper in vanishing oxygen

which they cherish

(The initial part of the poem "secret study" from volume "The Errancy", 1997)

7

Experience ourselves harder, experiencing no leniency. Be present. To live. In the poetry of the body is the main problem. Subsequent attempts to force the poems bring the resistance of the skin, trying to penetrate deeper. Very clear song "When" the resurrection of bodies »Luca Signorelli" ("Erosion", 1983) develops the traditional ekfrazy: this is a well-known fresco adorning the walls of the cathedral in Orvieto, where the skeletons crawl out of the ground in the roar of the trumpets of archangels. Graham interested in the process of embodiment, artistry and empathy artist. The image is swinging, the characters leave the walls of the cathedral and come to life in the Italian town ("there / distance, there is / / perspective"). End of line play action painter, who after the death of his only son had to bring his body back to the studio, put on the table, wait for the right light

and then with discernment, skill,

grace and attention

broke into the shadows,

pierced

the bones and tendons, all

depressions

collected in the cold light.

Whole

lasted days

This deep

caress, cutting,

the stretching,

up his mind

climbed

in an open body

and healed.

Signorelli sensitive like a surgeon who cuts the skin layer and slowly slips his hand inside. The poet tries to penetrate the solid surface of bodies and things, provoking images of her holes, clearances, wounds, fissures, cracks, theme descent into the mud, digging the earth ("still digs per square meter of soil, / to describe and flattened on a piece of everything there be able to find "). Simulating punching blades into the system verses "The Resurrection ..." stabilizes in the next tomikach, and since the "Sea Change" (2008) ruled supreme: long lines alternating with short, beginning in the middle part.

Or just as a fault, space, white, unprinted paper:

Underneath his chest, weightless holy place

And little it weighs your open hand on her.

8

Jorie Graham breaks with the tradition of linguistic epiphany, does not believe in simple words able to get to the bottom. Probably because the lines of swell, grow in different directions. Played time - lovers look at each other in the eye, the hand unbuttoning buttons men's shirt, the heroine hung laundry in the garden, a neighbor brings freshly caught fish wyfiletowane - takes at least a few dozen lines of command and every time you touch reveals how doll doll, his next film. This strategy involves telling the concepts of human thought and perception. Since the mind works slowly, it is sloppy and associative, as the world absorbed by the senses is a cacophonous blur, it may not be opposed to the basic sensations. Instead, we must look for trigger gates. Ago are gaps and clearances to show up when the thick line payment of the thread.

9

Zbigniew Herbert followed a completely different path, but part of his line of screaming pop music could be the credo of American poet. Shout

is like a blade

driven into the mystery

but does not charge the

the mystery

does not recognize the shapes

Graham does not scream. Tourist reality of words, talks to her provocative and forth to her fishing line and hooks, probes shape so that when the time comes to break through to the other side.

10th

I'm going back to the moment that the stretch. Graham is not a novel writer, how would it najżarliwsi followers. To gain an impression of spontaneous action, with pleasure assembly technique is used, the description of simultaneous, stream of consciousness. Art Effect tame long treatment is sometimes brilliant, sometimes just tired. Do not share the enthusiasm of Ewa Chrusciel interpretation of the verse, "God removed" ("Never", 2002), which seems to me a literary exercise, elevated artificial equalization of the act of writing and resurrection (author noted down as if on a regular basis, first on the stairs, then inside the temple during Easter liturgy says that he writes under the oppressive gaze of the faithful, caught the sounds coming from behind the walls of flying birds).

However, it is a great poem "Fission" ("The region of unlikeness", 1991), in which the collision managed to piece together at least four orders of reality. Teenage girl in a movie theater watching "Lolita" by Stanley Kubrick. The screen Humbert Humbert comes to the garden, he sees for the first time "almost naked" and even unwanted by anyone Lo, in Dallas fall shots - killed John Kennedy, usher trying to stop the session, from different parts of the room burst beam lights that erase the physicality of film characters and opatulają girl in a shimmering shroud. The "split" guess the voice of a mature Jorie mixing remembered scenes from the novel Nabokov, conscious of the fact that all of her innocence came that afternoon in politics, femininity, death.

11th

Is organic line has to be political? In every other song author of "Hybrid plants and spirits" fly starlings, hummingbirds, geese, swallows, every few pages as a tree grows ontological issue. Nature is a strong presence in the field of view of Graham, and somewhere in the vicinity of the book "Never" comes to the fore. Critics have passed the last books of the luxuriantly growing trend overseas ekopoezji.

I have a problem with niepoetyckimi statements poet of recent years. When the talks in interviews about the summer months spent with her ​​ex-husband and daughter on a ranch in Wyoming, where the water was drawn from wells, wild prairies, the lack of shops and self nikłości to millions of years, listening to her nicely. When the prophetic ecological disaster caused by exceeding the maximum permissible emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it sounds convincing. But the opinion of the rows you want to save the world, they sound a fairy tale. I read it and I do not believe my eyes. Is it really this complicated, swirled them pictures of nature , which can not be understood, but you can feel it, grow from dreams of working up the imagination of the average inhabitant of the earth, that - according to the reasoning of Graham - filed rubbish and did not trust corporations to care about the fate of distant descendants ?

12th

The translated poems lack of ideological and doctrinaire tone leash. I would advise you to read them in isolation from the discussion of irreversible climate change. In an ironic affairs without charges. We are alone. Permanently excluded. Written for ninety poignant verses of "Peace" meeting with the fox can not succeed. We live "on the hook, which cast a in the brain / and into the throat into the / heart organ / internal / połknęliśmy / long streak", "language is a hook on which / you've been caught, / try to pull the strings, but do not. / They are ± across to you. "

How to become a present to the fox, if pierced body language? What is November?